Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Chapter 3: A Caucus Race and a Long Tale

Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar

Summary

The White Rabbit approaches Alice, looking for his gloves
and fan. Alice searches dutifully but cannot find them. The White
Rabbit mistakes Alice for his housemaid, Mary Ann, and commands
her to go to his house and fetch his things. Startled by the Rabbit’s demands,
Alice obeys and soon finds his house. As she walks, she thinks about
how strange it is to take orders from animals and imagines that
her cat Dinah might start ordering her around when she gets back
home. Inside of the house, she finds the gloves and fan, as well
as a little bottle labeled “DRINK ME.” Curious to find out what
the contents of the bottle will do, Alice drinks the liquid. Before
she can finish, she begins growing rapidly and can barely fit in
the room. Her arm dangles from a window and her foot becomes wedged
in the chimney.

Alice decides that her adventures are like a fairy tale
and imagines writing her own stories once she grows up. Given her
new size, she reasons that perhaps she has in fact grown up and
will never age. The White Rabbit interrupts her train of thought
by calling for his fan and gloves. He tries to storm into the house,
but Alice’s giant arm prevents the door from opening. The Rabbit
tries to climb through the window, but Alice bats him away with
her giant hand. The Rabbit calls out for his servant, Pat, and the
two begin to plot a way to deal with Alice when she swats them away
again. The Rabbit and Pat recruit another servant, a lizard named
Bill, to climb down the chimney, but Alice launches him into the
air with her foot. A crowd gathered outside calls to burn down the
house. Alice threatens to send Dinah to get them and they begin
hurling pebbles through the window at her face. The pebbles transform
into cakes, and reasoning that the cakes might cause her to become
smaller, Alice eats one and shrinks. She leaves the house and encounters
a mob of animals ready to rush her.

Alice flees and heads into a wood where she thinks about
how she might return to her normal size and find the garden. A sharp
bark causes her to look up at an enormous puppy standing over her. Afraid
it might be hungry, Alice tires it out by teasing it with a stick. She
then sets off, wondering what she might eat or drink to return to her
original height. She comes across a giant mushroom and climbs to
the top, discovering a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah with an air
of indifference.

Analysis

The White Rabbit’s status as an authority figure forces
Alice to adjust her perception that humans sit at the top of the
animal hierarchy. Alice wonders if her experiences in Wonderland
will affect the way she conducts herself when she gets back home,
since she imagines that she will have to start taking orders from
her cat Dinah. Alice accepts the inversion of the natural order
with the same faith that she might accept new information in her
normal day-to-day life. Wonderland breaks down Alice’s beliefs about
her identity and replaces those learned beliefs and understandings
of the world with Wonderland’s nonsensical rules. Alice understands
this identity displacement in terms of a fairy tale. She states,
“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never
happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” Fiction has intruded
on her own sense of reality, and she finds herself unable to keep
the two separate. Alice is no longer the Alice she knew at home
and is not altogether sure of who she is anymore.

Alice continues to have problems with her size, which
exacerbates her confusion over her identity and once again alludes
to the painful transition from childhood to adulthood. In Chapter
1, her changing size became a source of anxiety for Alice, revealing
her desire to remain a child and avoid the pressures of adulthood.
In this chapter, she identifies as a growing girl too large to be
shut in by forces that seek to constrict and repress her. The focus
on physical space in Chapter 4 emphasizes a child’s emerging feelings
of claustrophobia as he or she grows and changes. The house represents domestic
repression, an idea underscored by the fact that Alice enters it
as a servant girl. When Alice literally outgrows the house, her
body manifests her desire to transcend the boundaries of her confined
existence.

When Alice meets the puppy, she finally discovers a Wonderland creature
that behaves in a way that she expects. Unlike the other creatures
Alice encounters in Wonderland, the puppy behaves the way a puppy
would in the real world. Alice isn’t the only one who recognizes
this aberration in the logic of Wonderland. In a later chapter,
the Cheshire Cat tries to prove to Alice that it is “mad” by comparing
itself to a dog, which it views as being quite normal. The fact
that the dog is the only thing in Wonderland that resembles Alice’s
reality at home may be a function of the fact that Carroll hated
dogs. Carroll reveals his disdain for canines by giving the dog none
of the magical qualities of the other animals in Wonderland.